Out There: a novel (22 page)

As the dogs played on, Jefferson thought of his warm bed, the pink-tiled bathroom with its warm water, and for a moment he wished for home. It was cold, and he didn’t want to spend the night outside again.

Just then, he saw a dog—a new dog, the eighth—up the street, approaching the plaza from the direction of the bar in an off-kilter hop. As the dog approached, Jefferson could see that it was a hound—mostly basset, he guessed, going by its long, loppy ears—and that it had only three legs. On its way toward Jefferson, the dog stopped momentarily to sniff a patch of dirt and then to watch at a distance the play of the other dogs, diversionary techniques that did not fool Jefferson. Knowing that the dog was a hound, knowing that it was maimed, knowing how the magic of the universe worked when his eyes were open, Jefferson had no doubt that the dog was headed his way, that it had spotted him and smelled him and known him from afar. He knew that the dog was pacing himself on an inevitable trajectory that must end at Jefferson’s feet.

Though Jefferson had guessed that Remedios contained a trace of hound in her blood, at the shelter he’d purposefully avoided any of the dogs that seemed predominantly hound. He had too many traumatic memories when it came to that breed. Like scorpions and the sight of his peers staring off into the distance with scared, sad eyes, the sight of a hound awoke in him an instant melancholy. And that was nothing compared to the feeling that washed over Jefferson when he heard a distant baying carried on the wind at night. “Why, oh why?” he muttered aloud to himself as he watched the hound’s sure approach—it was now just fifteen feet away, and closing in—couldn’t war just be a bad dream? Why couldn’t it be real, the apparatus to make a man forget his bad memories?

It had happened the day he backed over the hound dog in the Humvee. It had been fresh in his mind when he’d heard the poor dog scream. At the time Jefferson’s heart was so heavy that he could hardly register any additional losses, but nonetheless he had put his head against the steering wheel and sobbed when he realized what had happened to the dog.

Jefferson must have erased some of the details from his mind; he could not remember why he’d been walking on that deserted Iraqi village street on that particular day. It was a Thursday afternoon, late in 2008. If he tried to think about it, he knew he must have been scared. Lost, maybe? He thought it had happened in a town far from Anaconda, though he had no idea why he’d been there. And why had he been alone? He was never supposed to be alone—he knew that. He was certain his heart had been racing, his hands shaking. He could see now the hard lines of sunlight slicing through the narrow gaps between buildings, buildings two and three and four stories tall. It was a city, then, somewhere in that vast hard-packed desert, a place he’d never been before. He didn’t know why he’d been there at all, why he’d been alone.

He remembered a sudden screeching of tires and car metal, a sudden confluence of screaming and radio signals, breaking into his feeling of being all alone in a distant land. Up ahead his way was blocked by cars, several rough-looking men standing next to them, talking into cell phones, so he’d turned down a side street, hoping for help. He began to run.

His hands shook with the sudden realization that he had a pistol in his belt, that he was prepared if it came to that. The street was narrow, too narrow for the sun to reach it now, and he was alone and scared and running. Behind him, he thought he heard cars closing in, trapping him in that narrow passage, and his heart pounded. He hoped it was all a dream, that he would soon wake, but the men were running after him and he was sure he had been left in this walled city and then he turned up yet another narrow alley, one final attempt to get away, and there was the guy three feet in front of him, screaming at him—he had a gun, he would shoot. But Jefferson was ready, his hands shaking in their preparations, waiting to do the thing he did not want to do. And the guy was screaming and Jefferson was alone and scared, and so he pulled the trigger. A quick movement that changed his life.

Not much later Jefferson had learned that the guy, only a kid, just seventeen years old, had been on his way home with groceries for his mother. Jefferson had fallen in a heap on top of the boy’s body, next to the boy’s shrieking mother, and he had not heard anything the other members of his unit were telling him about where they’d been and why he’d found himself all alone and scared and running. Instead he had lain with the boy and his mother, singing words he knew to be true of himself, words that had been inspired by Gabriel and had made him wonder
why
more than ever.

War has made me a killer of good people.

A killer of good people.

Worse than the worst.

Worse than the worst.

The boy had died immediately, though the hound had not. Its death was a slow march to an end that was inevitable as soon the heavy tires and steel rolled over its bony body. It chose as a final resting place a spot somewhere within earshot of Jefferson’s bed, and so he had no choice but to listen to each of its solitary yelps toward death.

After that, Jefferson hadn’t been able to face the idea of traveling home, even though he’d been due a visit, though he’d e-mailed Esco that he’d be taking leave soon. The killing of the boy and the killing of the hound all in one day had killed too much within him. Going home would not be possible.

Seeing this Mexican hound had brought all that loss back, but now, even as he registered the pain, Jefferson also glimpsed some degree of hope. For this inspired creature, with its glistening sable coat and its ears that nearly swept the ground, was using its three good legs in a perfectly synchronized motion—a triumphant motion it seemed to Jefferson—as he approached. This hound had prevailed over its fate, and for that, Jefferson was thankful. Maybe, he thought, what he needed was not an apparatus to make him forget his bad memories, precisely, but rather one that could shift the past’s dark horrors into memories of perseverance and light. This was the fiction he needed to be real.

Jefferson sat for he knew not how long, rubbing the hound’s ears and reciting lines to it and to the other dogs on the plaza. Finally, a woman came out into the street from a house down the way, wearing a robe and calling out for the hound. When she saw Jefferson and asked what he was doing outside so late, and discovered that he planned to sleep on the bench, she insisted that he and the pup come home and sleep on her couch, and in the morning he could have a warm shower and breakfast.

What
happened that day in the forest between Dolores Hidalgo and San Miguel de Allende? Like a dream, it began and ended on a road he never traveled again, with people who never again crossed his path. He was almost one hundred percent sure it had been real.

The incident began with a slim young girl whose magnetic eyes made it impossible for Jefferson to say no. He had to follow her.

He had stopped alongside the two-lane highway. A stretch of broad hills sloped away easily, clothed with shin-high grass punctuated here and there by the most interesting trees. He’d watched the trees pass by in his periphery for several miles before deciding to stop and take a closer look. Later he’d looked them up—Mexican piñons, a species related to the piñons in northern New Mexico, slow-growing conifers with sap-heavy bark, each with a distinct and forlorn asymmetry of twisted arms and knotted stubs. They looked out of place on the Mexican hillside, and he imagined them as exiles from the Holy Land. He’d never been to Palestine, but he’d been close enough, and these trees breathed a Middle Eastern breath to him.

On that day one particular piñon twenty feet off the road inspired him to stop and park. He walked the short distance uphill and pressed his palms against its gnarled trunk, breathing in the resinous scent which reminded him of jasmine tea. Raising his chin, he studied the branches—a few of them seemed to beg for pruning, but he resisted their call—and their geometric dissections of the sky. And then he decided to climb. His hands grasping the lowest branches, he’d placed his left foot in a natural foothold, gripped, and had pulled himself up when he felt a sharp tug on the back of his shirt and a small but imperious voice.

“Ayúdeme!”

Help me.
Jefferson’s mind traveled back to Spanish class, to a word he’d had no need to remember until that moment. He turned to find a slight girl standing just below him. She wore a thin cotton shift that fell loosely over her shoulders to her knobby knees. On her feet, a pair of rubber clogs, much too large.

“Por favor, mister. Ayúdeme!”

She motioned frantically, her breath short and shallow. “Pronto! Pronto!” she gasped and then turned, running up the hillside through the tall grass toward denser forest. Jefferson watched her run, the pup alongside her, unsure what to do. Should he follow? He felt the tug of the child’s innocence. Could he leave the motorbike on the side of the road?

At the end of twenty yards she stopped and turned to see Jefferson still standing beside the tree. Even at that distance the child’s brown eyes commanded him. What was he waiting for? She flapped her arms and jumped up and down, yelling, “Pronto! Pronto! Pronto!” And as she did so, Remedios yipped a similar injunction.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

After pulling the motorbike behind a bush, where he left it with a silent prayer that it would be there when he returned, Jefferson sprinted up the hill after the child and the pup, who by that time were far ahead, across the open hillside and running into the denser, flatter pine forest. In less than five minutes they’d come to a clearing, low grasses surrounded by mixed pines and cedars. The place had the feeling of a hollow, though it was not clear if the land was actually lower there or if the taller trees made it seem as if it were.

A hundred yards before they arrived at their destination Jefferson could hear low groans of pain, and dread grew within him. He had heard the sound of pain so many times in the war zone, he didn’t know if he could face that sound—and the suffering person who inevitably came with it—again. A constable of ravens sat overhead in the tallest of the surrounding pines, and these gave him some comfort. Esco had always told him that people who feared ravens simply did not understand the species.

All he knew to expect was the damage done by gunfire or explosion, but what he came upon instead was the girl’s mother in the midst of childbirth.

The woman lay on a quilt atop a bed of pine needles. Draped on low branches hung a few articles of clothing—a few small dresses that must have been the child’s and a few larger ones, obviously the woman’s. Two mugs, a saucepan, and two spoons perched on a circle of rocks around the charred remains of a campfire. So this was their home. Scattered around the base of the tree were a vinyl suitcase, a plastic doll dressed in denim, some blankets, and one large chopping knife on a wooden block.

The child took her place next to her mother, bent down, and whispered something into her ear. Then she stared with scared eyes at Jefferson. The woman had paused between two waves of pain, and Jefferson leaned down to try to talk to her.

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” he said, feeling a little stupid; it was plain that the child would not have come running if all was well.  He also imagined that the woman spoke no English.

“Por favor,” the child said, the only thing she knew to say as she held her mother’s hand.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jefferson said, feeling his breath fall away. “I’m not a doctor—I have no idea what to do.”

The woman arched backward with a terrifying scream that sent the girl into a fit of panicky babbling and tears. Once her pain had eased, Jefferson knelt down beside the two. He touched the mother’s arm and then that of the girl. “I don’t know what to do,” he repeated, shaking his head, but then, seeing the fear in the woman’s eyes, he changed his tone. “It’s gonna be okay, okay? It’s okay—I’ll do my best, okay?”

He knew that though the woman’s cries came from her mouth, and though her bulging belly was the location of her baby, neither of these were where the action was about to take place. He knew that if he was going to help this woman deliver this baby, he was going to have to kneel between her legs. His eyes were going to have to be wide open, his hands ready to touch and calm and cajole and hold. There was no time to ponder as the young girl begged him with her eyes and the woman clutched his wrists and the unseen baby made its inevitable way nearer to them all in the quiet hollow of that solitary wood.

He spoke to them to calm himself, to organize his thoughts in a time of stress, even though he knew they could not understand his words.

“I’m just going to move down here and see what I can see,” he said, sliding between the woman’s legs and lifting the blanket that covered her. At first he saw all the expected sights: knees, feet, skin. But when he forced his eyes down to below the woman’s belly, he was momentarily confused.

“Wow. Okay. I think I can see the baby’s head,” he said. “That must be what that is—WOW,” he said again, trying to appear calm, trying to mask his bewilderment. It was too much to ask of a young man with very little experience with women, to help deliver a baby. For an odd moment Jefferson tried to think if ever in his wildest dreams he had imagined this contortion of hips and vagina and vulva and anus. And there was definitely a small, wet head jammed in, like a cork, between all those lips and folds and wrinkles. He thought again that really, he was not the man for this job.

The young girl was at his side now, kneeling down with him and grasping her mother’s ankles. The mother spoke a few quick words to her daughter and then looked at Jefferson again with pleading eyes, as if to remind him that this life is for the living. It did not matter what he had done or not done prior to this moment. This right here, this now, was all that mattered. A scattered line came to him in the moment, one that he could not place, and he began to chant it now as the woman set her jaw and attempted to gain purchase in the task at hand.